Celebrating changemakers in Macon

I and dozens of other journalists and Mercer students gathered at the Woodruff House on top of Coleman Hill to celebrate the Reg Murphy Center for Collaborative Journalism’s 2025 Changemaker last Friday.

The annual award honors a “journalist, entrepreneur or other media figure who is changing the way the public consumes news and information and is working to find solutions to address information gaps.” 

Past winners include Robin Kemp — who launched the one-person newsroom The Clayton Crescent in 2020 to cover Clayton County and who now works for The Current, a nonprofit news organization for Coastal Georgia — Matt Thompson and Celeste Headlee. 

This year’s CCJ Changemaker was 13WMAZ’s Digital Content Manager Justin Baxley. And boy, did he deserve it. 

Let me tell you why.

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First, a quick aside: Speaking of awards, the 67th incarnation of The Grammys was announced Sunday night and amidst the roof-raising performances and star-studded winners list, you might have missed a winner from tiny Plains, Georgia.

Jimmy Carter posthumously won his fourth Grammy in the best audiobook, storytelling and narration category for “Last Sundays in Plains: A Centennial Celebration.” 

The audiobook featured recordings from Sunday School lessons delivered at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains. Carter, who died Dec. 29, had previously won three other Grammys from nine nominations (his first win in 2006 froze out The Melody and Macon’s own Ed Grisamore, who had been nominated in the same category).

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Back to the “why.” Justin and I met each other five years ago when I moved from El Dorado, Arkansas to Macon to start my job as senior editor of The Macon Telegraph. My first day was March 2, 2020. 

I was excited. That Friday I wandered around downtown, eating good food, taking in the sights, admiring what I could tell was a dynamic and growing community. Of course, two weeks later, everything changed.

The newsroom started working from home, unsure of so many things. We didn’t know what this COVID-19 was, how it spread and how deeply it would change our world. We were just surviving each day, trying to manage our own anxiety and fear while navigating a bizarre work setup and attempting to provide accurate, timely, actionable information to our readers. 

When I was hired, Justin covered sports, food and culture. That changed almost overnight. Restaurants closed, sports events were canceled and there was this new global health crisis to report on. 

Reporters are almost universally creatures of habit. They enjoy the knowledge and familiarity that comes with a beat. In 2020, every reporter became a pandemic reporter, to a certain extent, but COVID became Justin’s focus. His schedule changed, his beat changed, but he didn’t complain. Instead, he dove head first into learning everything he could so that people in Middle Georgia could make informed decisions. 

That year, Justin wrote more than 200 stories — many were updates on COVID infections and deaths. Others were inspiring stories of how folks came together during the pandemic, found community online, found ways to survive, to cope, to thrive. They were all important.

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Not that reporting during the pandemic was easy. And that year Justin’s life, as it has often been, was impacted by personal tragedy.

In January 2021, Justin lost his great-grandparents Gladys and J H “Buddy” Dean to COVID within 10 days of each other. Anyone who knows Justin knows how much Gladys and Buddy meant to him, how they inspired his love of journalism, supported him, helped raise him. 

Justin has dealt with far more than his fair share of tragedy. In 2017, Justin’s dad Michael was shot and killed in Macon. To this day, no one has been charged with his murder. 

Justin had graduated from Mercer University with his degree in journalism but he wasn’t working in the industry at the time. Reporters began to contact him repeatedly as they worked on the story. Their motives were perhaps good: they wanted to humanize a homicide victim in a city where killings can feel all too routine.

But, as journalists can often do, they didn’t stop to consider the impact their calls and questions would have on Justin. “Minimize harm” is part of the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics. We should take it more seriously. 

Justin remembered how he felt and what he needed the day his father died. So years later, as a Poynter-Koch journalism fellow, he created the project “More Than a Number” that provides the family of victims with a simple, powerful way to share stories about their loved one, as well as a victim’s resource guide to connect them with the support they need.

That project has now been implemented at 13WMAZ and sister stations across the country. How’s that for making change?

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Over the five years we’ve known each other, our jobs have changed. Justin no longer reports to me. Now we’re colleagues with management responsibilities at different Macon news organizations. Even though we no longer see each other every day, we talk regularly about journalism, fantasy football and life in general. Our phone calls typically cross the one-hour mark. 

I loved being Justin’s editor. I’m even more grateful to be his friend.

Caleb Slinkard is the managing editor of The Macon Melody. Email him at caleb@maconmelody.com.